Modernism - the history, movements, and characteristics of the art movement

Modernism is the collective name for the upheaval that transformed art between around 1860 and 1950 – the period when painting stopped depicting the world and began examining itself. In just under a century, Western art moved from the Salon’s polished history painting to Jackson Pollock’s drip canvases, and along the way artists invented Impressionism, Cubism, Expressionism, Futurism, Dadaism, Surrealism, and abstraction. Almost every poster or painting regarded as modern today has its roots in this period.

This page explains what modernism actually was: when it began, which movements it encompassed, what unites them despite their very different appearances, how it came to Sweden, and why it became politically dangerous in the 1930s. We draw on information from Moderna Museet in Stockholm, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Gothenburg Museum of Art, the Mjellby Museum of Art in Halmstad, and auction data from Sotheby’s. Finally, there is a practical guide to how modernist motifs work on the wall in a Swedish home.

Contents
↓ What is modernism?
↓ The history of modernism – Paris 1863 to New York 1945
↓ The most important movements of modernism
↓ Characteristics, techniques, and visual language
↓ Modernism in Sweden
↓ When modernism became forbidden art
↓ Modernism’s legacy in today’s visual culture
↓ Modernist motifs in interior design
↓ Timeline of modernism
↓ Related movements and artists
↓ Frequently asked questions about modernism

What is modernism?

Modernism is not a style but an attitude. What unites a Monet water-lily pond with a Malevich black square is not their appearance but their fundamental premise: that art’s task is no longer to reproduce a visible reality as convincingly as possible, but to investigate what an image is and what it can do. From that attitude grew around fifty movements that often fought one another but shared the same fundamental idea of freedom.

The period is usually considered to extend from 1860s Paris, where Édouard Manet and the Impressionists made the brushstroke itself visible for the first time instead of hiding it, to around 1950–1970, when Abstract Expressionism in New York completed the project and postmodernism began to question it. During those decades, the center of gravity of art shifted geographically from Paris to New York, technically from oil painting to collage, photography, and found objects, and in terms of content from subject matter to expression.

One important distinction: modern art refers to the historical period described here, while contemporary art refers to what is being made now. A painting from 1912 is therefore modern art but not contemporary. That is why the Museum of Modern Art in New York, which opened on November 7, 1929, still has that name even though its core collection is now more than a hundred years old.

Quick facts: Modernism spans approximately 1860–1950. Its starting point is generally considered to be the Salon des Refusés in Paris in 1863, established by Napoleon III. Paris remained its center until 1940, after which the focus shifted to New York. The movement encompasses Impressionism, Post-Impressionism, Fauvism, Expressionism, Cubism, Futurism, Dadaism, De Stijl, Bauhaus, Surrealism, Suprematism, and Abstract Expressionism, among others. The Museum of Modern Art opened on November 7, 1929, and Moderna Museet in Stockholm on May 9, 1958. The most expensive modernist work ever sold at auction is Gustav Klimt's portrait of Elisabeth Lederer, sold for $236.4 million at Sotheby's on November 18, 2025.

The history of modernism – Paris 1863 to New York 1945

In 1863, the Paris Salon jury rejected so many submitted works that the protests reached Napoleon III. The emperor ordered a parallel exhibition for the rejected works, the Salon des Refusés, where Manet's Le Déjeuner sur l'herbe was among the paintings displayed. The public laughed, the critics raged – and art history got its starting point. For the first time, there was a public space for art that established taste had rejected, and modernists would make use of that opportunity for the next ninety years.

The Impressionists' breakthrough in 1874

Eleven years later, a group of artists organized their own exhibition in the photographer Nadar's studio on Boulevard des Capucines. Monet, Degas, Renoir, Pissarro, and Berthe Morisot displayed canvases in which light mattered more than objects. The critic Louis Leroy coined the term Impressionism as a mockery, and the artists embraced it. Their real contribution was not their subjects but the principle that the artist themselves, not a jury, decides what is finished and worth exhibiting.

1907–1914 – the radical years

The years immediately preceding the First World War were modernism's most intense period. Pablo Picasso painted Les Demoiselles d'Avignon in 1907 and shattered linear perspective. Filippo Tommaso Marinetti published the Futurist Manifesto in Le Figaro on February 20, 1909. Wassily Kandinsky produced his first entirely non-representational watercolors around 1910–1913. During the same years, Hilma af Klint worked quietly in Stockholm on an abstraction that no one would see until 1986.

Armory Show 1913 – when America meets modernism

In February 1913, the International Exhibition of Modern Art opened in a regimental armory on Lexington Avenue in New York. The exhibition showed 1,090 works by 306 artists and attracted around 87,000 visitors in New York alone; after traveling on to Chicago and Boston, approximately 300,000 Americans had seen it. Marcel Duchamp's Nude Descending a Staircase became the scandal's centerpiece and was described in the press as an explosion in a shingle factory. The Armory Show moved the American art audience three decades forward in a month and laid the groundwork for New York to later take over as the capital of the art world.

The war, the exodus and New York's takeover

When Germany occupied France in 1940, a large part of the European avant-garde moved across the Atlantic. Piet Mondrian, Max Ernst, André Breton, Marc Chagall, Fernand Léger and Josef Albers all ended up in the United States. They brought European theory with them and encountered a generation of young American painters who could afford neither tradition nor respect for it. Out of that encounter, Abstract Expressionism emerged in New York in the 1940s, and with it the center of gravity of Modernism had left Europe for good.

The most important movements of Modernism

Modernism works best as a map of movements rather than as a single line of development. Many of them took place simultaneously in different cities and borrowed freely from one another. Here are the major names and what each contributed.

The movements of color: Fauvism and Expressionism

The Fauves around Henri Matisse and André Derain freed color from the subject around 1905. A face could be green if the painting required it. German Expressionism, with the groups Die Brücke in Dresden from 1905 and Der Blaue Reiter in Munich from 1911, pursued the same freedom but in the direction of anxiety and spirituality instead of joy. Edvard Munch's The Scream from 1893 had already shown the way.

The movements of form: Cubism, Futurism and Constructivism

Where the Fauves attacked color, Cubism attacked form. Picasso and Georges Braque broke objects into facets and showed them from several angles at once between 1907 and 1914. Futurism in Italy added speed and machines, Russian Constructivism added social utility, and De Stijl in the Netherlands reduced everything to right angles and the three primary colors. They all started from the same insight: that a painting is a constructed surface, not a window.

The movements of thought: Dadaism and Surrealism

During the First World War, Dadaism arose in Zurich as a furious joke at a civilization that had just failed. Marcel Duchamp exhibited a urinal as a sculpture in 1917, thereby shifting the value of the artwork from craftsmanship to the idea. From the ruins of Dadaism grew Surrealism, which, beginning with André Breton's 1924 manifesto, made dreams and the unconscious into visual material for Salvador Dalí, Joan Miró, and René Magritte.

The movements of abstraction

The most radical branch abandoned the subject entirely. Kandinsky, Kazimir Malevich, Hilma af Klint, and Mondrian all arrived at non-representational art in the 1910s, independently of one another and for very different reasons – theosophy, mathematics, spirituality, music. Read more in our overview of abstract art. Thirty years later, Jackson Pollock and Mark Rothko picked up the thread in New York and made the abstract canvas into something one steps into rather than observes.

"Art is a lie that makes us realize the truth." – Pablo Picasso, in an interview published in The Arts magazine, May 1923

Characteristics, technique, and visual language

Although the movements look different, recurring features make modernist works recognizable. They concern less the subject than how the image is constructed.

The surface is allowed to show

Classical painting concealed its traces: brushstrokes were smoothed out until the canvas was transformed into an illusion. The modernists did the opposite. Monet's dabs of color, Van Gogh's relief-like impasto, Cézanne's square brushstrokes, and later Pollock's drip marks all make clear that this is painted color on a surface. It is perhaps the single most important change of the period, and it can be read directly even in a reproduction.

Perspective is abandoned

The Renaissance's linear perspective, formulated by Filippo Brunelleschi around 1415, had governed the construction of images for five hundred years. Cubism abolished it in seven. In its place came flat pictorial spaces, simultaneous views, and compositions organized by color intensity and form rather than distance. The effect is that the gaze moves across the image instead of into it.

New materials and techniques

The period invented collage, when Braque and Picasso pasted wallpaper fragments and newspaper clippings in 1912. It brought photography into the realm of art through Man Ray and László Moholy-Nagy, industrial paints through Pollock, found objects through Duchamp, and paper cutouts through the later Matisse. Taken together, the definition of what an artwork could consist of expanded more during these fifty years than during the previous five hundred.

Manifesto as an art form

One underestimated characteristic is that modernist groups wrote. Marinetti’s Futurist manifesto of 1909, Breton’s Surrealist manifesto of 1924, Gropius’s Bauhaus manifesto of 1919 and De Stijl’s programme texts are literature as much as art politics. Modernism is the first period in which artists themselves formulated the theory – and this is partly why the movements have such distinct names and dates.

Modernism in Sweden

Modernism came to Sweden late and faced resistance for a long time. The turning point was Henri Matisse’s art school in Paris, where a group of young Swedes studied around 1908–1911 and brought home the lesson that colour conveys feeling rather than describing reality.

Matisse’s Students and the Three Scandalous Exhibitions

Sigrid Hjertén (1885–1948) and Isaac Grünewald (1889–1946) both studied under Matisse in 1910–1911 and are regarded by art historians as the artists who brought Modernism to Sweden. Together with Nils Dardel, Einar Jolin and Leander Engström, Grünewald organised three exhibitions at Hallins art dealership in Stockholm that caused outrage in the press but established Expressionism in Sweden. Hjertén’s Studio Interior from 1916, depicting the family’s studio at Stadsgården with a blue cityscape in the background, is often regarded as a key work of Swedish Modernism. Our entire range of Swedish artworks reflects this tradition.

The Halmstad Group and Swedish Surrealism

In 1929, the Halmstad Group was formed by six artists: Sven Jonson, Waldemar Lorentzon, Stellan Mörner, Axel Olson, Erik Olson and Esaias Thorén. Influenced by Gösta Adrian-Nilsson, known as GAN, they worked their way through Cubism, Purism and Futurism before arriving at a distinctive Swedish Surrealism. Their works are on permanent display at Mjellby Art Museum in Halmstad, which grew out of the group’s own exhibition venue.

Moderna Museet – from drill hall to European heavyweight

Moderna Museet opened in the old drill hall on Skeppsholmen on 9 May 1958, after decades of discussion about a Swedish museum for 20th-century art. That same year, the Association for Contemporary Art donated 150 works by Scandinavian artists. The real breakthrough came in 1963 with the Museum of Our Desires campaign, when the government provided five million kronor to purchase works by, among others, Giacomo Balla, Francis Picabia, Kurt Schwitters and Giorgio de Chirico. Today, the collection comprises approximately 6,000 paintings, 25,000 graphic works, 400 art videos and 100,000 photographs. The museum has always maintained close ties with the artists themselves – Andy Warhol held his first solo exhibition at a European museum here in 1968. In 2026, among other things, the museum is presenting a survey of the Swedish post-war period drawn from its own collection.

When Modernism Became Forbidden Art

Modernism's freedom project made it a threat to authoritarian regimes. On July 19, 1937, the Entartete Kunst exhibition opened in Munich, where around 650 to 740 works by artists including Kirchner, Nolde, Kandinsky, Klee, and Chagall were hung with mocking texts to prove the decline of art. The exhibition was one of the most visited in history, but its purpose was condemnation. In parallel, the regime confiscated around 16,000 works from German museum collections. Some were sold abroad for foreign currency, while others were burned.

The campaign had three lasting consequences. First, an entire generation of artists was driven into exile, accelerating New York's rise. Second, works disappeared whose provenance is still being investigated by museums and restitution lawyers almost ninety years later. Third, after 1945, modernism was established as the art of democracy in the Western world - a position that made it part of state cultural policy throughout Europe and the United States during the Cold War. The Soviet Union also effectively banned its own avant-garde art from the mid-1930s onward in favor of socialist realism, silencing constructivism and suprematism.

Modernism's legacy in today's visual world

Modernism's experiments have influenced advertising, film, graphic design, furniture design, and everyday visual culture far more than most people realize. The Bauhaus, founded by Walter Gropius in Weimar in 1919 and closed by the regime in 1933, formulated the design logic that still governs everything from furniture catalogs to interfaces: function before ornament, sans serif typefaces, geometric clarity. De Stijl's grids and primary colors can be traced directly into modern web design, and the visual logic of surrealism lives on in commercials and music videos.

From a market perspective, modernism is the period that commands the highest prices. Klimt's portrait of Elisabeth Lederer, painted between 1914 and 1916 and sold at Sotheby's on November 18, 2025, for $236.4 million, is the most expensive modernist work ever sold at auction and the second-most expensive artwork overall. The fact that this particular period dominates the top auction records says something about how central it has become to the way we view images.

For those who buy art for their homes, the legacy means two things above all. Modernist motifs are robust in design because they are built on clear forms and color relationships rather than intricate detail, and they have a historical depth that keeps them from feeling dated after a few years. We have gathered the most sought-after works in the collection of artworks by famous artists.

Modernist motifs in interior design

Modernist art works well on the wall for a simple reason: it was made to be viewed from a distance. A Cubist composition or a Rothko colour field works just as well from the sofa three metres away as it does up close, whereas a detail-rich 17th-century still life requires you to step closer. This makes modernism a good choice for rooms where art is seen in passing.

Choose by temperature, not period

Mixing movements is perfectly fine – the artists did it themselves. What determines whether a wall feels cohesive is colour temperature. A Fauvist motif with warm orange and green, a Matisse cut-out and a warm-grey abstraction work excellently together. Add a cool blue Constructivist composition to the same group and the harmony is disrupted. Start with two or three recurring colours and let the visual language vary freely within that framework. Among our abstract posters and graphic posters, it is easy to build such a group.

Formats and frames for modernist motifs

Geometric and abstract motifs tolerate large formats better than figurative ones. A Cubist or Suprematist composition in 70×100 cm has the calm space it needs, while the same image in 30×40 cm often feels cluttered. The frame should be understated: slim black or light oak, preferably with a mount for paper-based motifs. A heavy gilt frame pulls the image towards a museum-hall aesthetic and undermines its modern feel. Feel free to look at minimalist posters if you want to balance a powerful modernist image with something more serene alongside it.

Tip: If you hang a striking modernist painting alone on a wall, try placing it five to ten centimetres below the usual eye level of 145 cm. Modernist compositions often have their visual weight in the upper half, and a slightly lower position makes the image feel anchored rather than as if it were floating. This rule is especially useful above a sofa or chest of drawers, where the distance to the top of the furniture should be around 20–25 cm.

Timeline of modernism

1863 – The Salon des Refusés opens in Paris on the orders of Napoleon III. Manet’s Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe causes a scandal.
1874 – The Impressionists’ first solo exhibition at photographer Nadar’s studio in Paris.
1905 – The Fauves exhibit at the Salon d'Automne; the group Die Brücke is formed in Dresden.
1907 – Picasso paints Les Demoiselles d'Avignon. Cubism begins.
1909 – Marinetti publishes the Futurist Manifesto in Le Figaro on February 20.
1913 – The Armory Show in New York presents 1,090 works by 306 artists to around 300,000 Americans.
1915 – Malevich exhibits Black Square in Petrograd and founds Suprematism.
1916 – Dadaism emerges at Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich. Sigrid Hjertén paints Studio Interior.
1919 – Walter Gropius founds Bauhaus in Weimar.
1924 – André Breton publishes the Surrealist Manifesto in Paris.
1929 – The Museum of Modern Art opens in New York on November 7. The Halmstad Group is formed in Sweden.
1937 – Entartete Kunst opens in Munich on July 19; around 16,000 works are confiscated from German collections.
1940–1945 – European artists flee to the United States. Abstract Expressionism emerges in New York.
1958 – Moderna Museet opens on Skeppsholmen in Stockholm on May 9.
1963 – Museum of Our Desires; the Swedish government allocates five million kronor for the purchase of modernist works.

Related movements and artists

Modernism is an umbrella term, and each movement within it has its own history. Start with Impressionism, which laid the foundation, and continue with Post-Impressionism, where Cézanne prepared the way for Cubism. For the geometric branch, there are De Stijl and Bauhaus, and for the final phase, Abstract Expressionism. Modernism's marginal figures also include Naïvism, which brought self-taught artists such as Henri Rousseau into art history and became an important source of inspiration for the avant-garde in Paris. An overview of the entire history of art can be found in our guide to art periods and movements.

If you would like to learn more about individual artists and their role during the period, we have written, among other things, about Sonia Delaunay and Orphism, Brâncuși and modern sculpture, the Gothenburg Colourists and the research behind why abstract art becomes personal. All our fact pages about artists and movements are collected in the Knowledge Base.

Frequently asked questions about modernism

Modernism is the period that taught us that a picture does not need to depict anything to mean something - and that insight is still the foundation of almost all the art we hang on our walls. Explore the full selection among our abstract posters or read more in the Knowledge Base about the individual movements.

Sources and further reading: Wikipedia on modernism, Moderna Museet in Stockholm, and Encyclopædia Britannica on modernism.